One week before Monday’s mass shooting in Manhattan, President Donald Trump ranted on his Truth Social platform that progressive criminal justice reforms were “endangering even our great law enforcement officers” and thus “crime in American cities started to significantly rise.” Monday’s shooting at a Midtown office tower that houses the NFL headquarters, where four people, including an off-duty New York City police officer, were killed and another was seriously wounded, is the deadliest incident of gun violence in New York City in decades.
The alleged shooter, 27-year-old Shane Devon Tamura, was a licensed gun owner and resident of Nevada, a state with a Republican governor. Tamura had a “documented mental health history,” police said, and was a former high school football player who reportedly left a three-page note at the site that mentioned the NFL and speculated his mental illness was a result of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated concussions in football. He had apparently driven cross-county last week from Nevada with his car full of ammunition. After his alleged shooting spree, Tamura died by suicide.
Despite the compelling picture that is developing of the accused murderer, in the wake of the shooting several prominent right-wing media outlets and figures were quick to pick up on Trump’s false premise misleadingly claiming that crime is out of control in cities across the nation.
Despite the compelling picture that is developing of the accused murderer, in the wake of the shooting several prominent right-wing media outlets and figures were quick to pick up on Trump’s false premise misleadingly claiming that crime is out of control in urban areas across the nation. In fact, crime rates are hitting historic lows in many cities across the country, including New York City. Earlier this year, New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch announced “historic reductions in overall crime,” which included the “fewest shooting incidents in recorded history.”
That didn’t stop Jesse Watters, the right-wing co-host of Fox News’ “The Five,” from opening Tuesday’s show by claiming “this attack brings a new focus on blue city crime. The Big Apple is electing its mayor in November and ‘Commie’ Mamdani’s old tweets are coming back to haunt him.” The swipe was curiously directed at the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, and not the current Democratic mayor of the city, Eric Adams, who is running for re-election. As the show’s lone liberal, Jessica Tarlov, expressed her sorrow about the shooting, the president took to Truth Social to blast her as “a real loser!!!”
Trump, who infamously spoke of “American carnage” during his first inaugural address, has long been a devout and fervent evangelist of the Fox News and MAGA mythology about crime and America’s urban centers. Earlier this year, he said that “[i]n major cities like New York, Chicago and Washington, mothers can’t walk their children to the park without fear of being shot or killed or raped or anything.”
Moments after news broke of the shooting, before the shooter had even been identified, Trump booster and Turning Point USA founder and president Charlie Kirk echoed the president, posting that he “was just in NYC all weekend with our family. Never felt safe. So many people in the city who don’t belong.”
On X, conspiracy theorist and Trump whisperer Laura Loomer later made the bigoted subtext explicit, repeatedly calling for Mamdani, who has been away visiting family and celebrating his nuptials in Uganda, to be refused reentry to the U.S. “I don’t feel safe with Muslims holding office in America. Mamdani inspires cop killers and Islamic terrorists to wage war on the streets of America while screaming ‘Free Palestine.’” One of the slain bystanders was a Muslim, police officer Didarul Islam, an immigrant who was reportedly the first NYPD officer of Bangladeshi descent to be killed in the line of duty.
Other MAGA influencers were also quick to jump on the anti-Mamdani bandwagon. Reposting a photo of the alleged gunman from an X account named “End Wokeness” — which boasts 3.8 million followers — frequent Fox News contributor Riley Gaines addressed a melodramatic question to an unidentified person or group: “Do you not realize how terrifying it is this is happening in a city where the mayoral candidate wants to defund the police?” Commentator Rogan O’Handley, better known as DC Draino, was succinct in implicating Mamdani: “These are the monsters he creates.”
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While many took to right-wing media to lodge attacks on a political candidate in the face of a mass shooting, others simultaneously trotted out the tired admonishment against politicizing a tragedy.
“On Capitol Hill, probably beginning in the morning, there’ll be the inevitable call by some of my colleagues for more gun control laws. We’ve got hundreds of gun control laws, maybe thousands,” said not-as-folksy-as-he-acts Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “We don’t need more gun control, we need more idiot control.” He used the same line after the Parkland school shooting in 2018. As of 2022, Kennedy had accepted more than $215,000 in campaign donations from the National Rifle Association over the course of his career.
The Louisiana Republican suggested a return to the discredited practice of racial profiling in policing. “The other thing that, frankly, New York’s going to have to face, is the issue of whether we should bring back more aggressive stop and frisk, which is a perfectly legal law enforcement tactic.”
All this misdirection, even in the face of a senseless mass shooting, is very deliberate. Trump’s Department of Justice has overseen hundreds of millions in cuts to federal funding for gun violence prevention programs targeted at U.S. cities — a fact he and the MAGA media don’t want to highlight. Instead, they are implementing the president’s tried-and-true strategy of deflection and diversion in hopes that no one will notice.
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But here are the facts. Trump recently claimed that cities run by Democrats have “heavy crime,” calling Los Angeles a “trash heap with entire neighborhoods under the control of transnational gangs and criminal networks.” In reality, violent crime in Los Angeles County has gone down nearly 7% and nonviolent crime has gone down almost 12%. The city’s homicide rate is projected to be the lowest on record in 60 years. Similarly, San Francisco in 2024 had the fewest number of murders since they started tracking the data in 1960. Across the country in Washington, D.C., violent crime rates reached a 30-year low in 2024. Chicago has seen “fewer than 200 homicides in the first six months of [2025] for the first time in more than a decade,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson recently announced, while homicide rates last year in Philadelphia were the lowest they’ve been in a decade. It’s the same story from Baltimore to New Orleans.
Big city crime, though, is a time-tested GOP strategy that Trump and his MAGA media supporters have perfected. Together they’ve honed this message for a decade now, exploiting and inflaming the fears, economic anxieties, prejudices and anger at elites shared by many voters across rural and suburban America, and in other economically challenged areas of the country. It’s long been a fact in politics that perceptions are often stronger than reality. The facts about declining urban crime rates aren’t sexy, but they happen to be true. Unfortunately, truth has never stopped them from spinning a story of American carnage.
